Religion Dispatches
…nd therefore damaging to all involved. Of course I don’t agree with Jacoby about God or religion or science, but I probably don’t agree with her about a lot of other things either. And whether or not I agree with her is not the point. The point is, as anyone who reads Jacoby regularly knows, this stereotype is simply false. She is brilliant, funny, compassionate, and—yes—spirited, and anything but bloodless or elitist. But reading an atheist, even…
Read More…as a Missionary Society presentation.) We had just finished singing a song about the weavings of our foremothers wombs, or something, and just before that Missy “No Pants” McDonyell had given a presentation arguing that it should be illegal for a man to grill meat in his own backyard. (Ostensibly, as I recall, it was because of the sexist construction of male cooking as public performance and female cooking as private duty. In actuality, it was be…
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…Atheists miscalculate the core significance of theism if they assume it is about doctrine and creeds, ritual forms and physical structures; those things most often attacked. Theism, at its core, is about the making of meaning and the establishment of stories and practices related to how and why we occupy time and space; ritual, doctrines, sacred texts and so on are only cultural manifestations of this deeper meaning. These rituals and doctrines ar…
Read More…hop of Chicago, said in a deposition that Rassas had “withheld information about abuse allegations.” These are two of the people who will be seeing whether Girl Scouts USA meets the appropriate standards for a Catholic organizational partner. In light of this, why not ask whether the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth meet Girl Scouts USA’s standards, rather than just the other way around? Girl Scouts USA has, after all, develope…
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…cross paths with ancients like Alexander the Great and Nefertiti; we learn about moderns like the scientist Linus Pauling (an evangelist for the powers of the curative elixir we call Vitamin C); and we pay a visit to Dr. Frankenstein and his creature. It’s easy to appreciate Cave’s general authorial sensibility. The wide-angle lens he uses to survey the history of human hopes for immortality contextualizes the apocalyptic promises that scientistic…
Read More…dvocates for reason and science-based policy, had this to say this morning about the conventions: “Much about these political conventions has been extremely disheartening to secular Americans: Trivial bickering about who mentioned God a sufficient number of times, the fact of our warming planet being used as a punchline for derision, and leaders constantly citing Bronze Age mystical texts as a basis for acting on our very real problems. And at alm…
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…the gods every 27 years. But the public never got the memo. This happened about 50 years ago, and the nonsense about the world ending on 12/21/12 has been happening ever since. All that the inscriptions say is a gladdening of the hearts of the gods every 27 years, which is far from ‘the world is going to end on December 21.’ This whole 12/21/12 is a big manufactured brouhaha. 21st-century crap. But the good thing is that it will get people to vis…
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…ungry for leadership and willing to “listen to the data” and “be guided by science,” the appeal is understandable. It’s also mistaken. To be fair, economists are not placing a value on individual lives. They’re asking a different question: how much would people choose to pay to reduce their risk of dying? And there’s the problem. No one chooses to be in this pandemic. Essential workers weren’t given the choice to assess the risks of not having pro…
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…one’s will alone. The fifth tenet states that beliefs should comport with science, and in TST’s view, Missouri’s informed consent literature is not based on science. Missouri also has a RFRA law meaning the state cannot burden anyone’s religion without demonstrating a compelling interest. The cases were dismissed but TST began thinking about what it would look like to give religious significance to abortion. Contrary to the claims of TST’s detrac…
Read More…k Perry’s claim that it is a “Ponzi scheme,” and Huntsman in defending the science on global warming ane evolution, and in (wow, praising some baseline stuff here) describing undocumented immigrants as “human beings.” Perry, of course, was playing to the tea partiers by not backing down on his insistence that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (see this handy graphic for the crucial distinctions between the criminal enterprise of a Ponzi scheme and…
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